First turnkey IoT solution

What are the four fac­tors dri­ving Indus­try 4.0 and the Inter­net of Things? These are pri­mar­i­ly net­work­ing, adapt­abil­i­ty, ener­gy effi­cien­cy and new busi­ness mod­els. With the IoT gate­way CPX-IoT, Fes­to is paving the way for a secure cloud solu­tion which will enable machine and sys­tem builders as well as end cus­tomers to sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve their over­all equip­ment effectiveness.
Ful­ly net­worked “things” will sim­pli­fy busi­ness life in the future. If the prin­ci­ple of the Inter­net of Things is applied to road traf­fic, improved net­work­ing would have a whole host of advan­tages. For exam­ple, vehi­cles with opti­mal brak­ing per­for­mance would be more ener­gy-effi­cient. Pro­cess­ing traf­fic data means that a nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem would steer vehi­cles around diver­sions, prov­ing its adapt­abil­i­ty. Net­work­ing all the traf­fic lights togeth­er allows them to react to chang­ing flows of traf­fic. This leads to brand new busi­ness mod­els, at the heart of which is the ques­tion: how much would a dri­ver be will­ing to pay for a wave of green lights?

Preparing the ground for Industry 4.0

As this vision of mod­ern road traf­fic shows, the fac­tors of net­work­ing, adapt­abil­i­ty, ener­gy effi­cien­cy and new busi­ness mod­els are cru­cial for the era of Indus­try 4.0. The com­pa­ny is shap­ing this era through six key mea­sures. Prod­ucts and solu­tions that are fit for Indus­try 4.0, such as dig­i­tal pneu­mat­ics with the Fes­to Motion Ter­mi­nal, take cen­tre stage. These are cre­at­ed through con­tin­u­ous research and devel­op­ment – with­in the com­pa­ny, in research net­works and in the Bion­ic Learn­ing Net­work. Opti­mis­ing the sup­ply chain makes pro­duc­tion process­es more effi­cient. How­ev­er, Indus­try 4.0 could fail if the peo­ple affect­ed by dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion are not pre­pared for it or for their role in it. It there­fore makes sense to launch “Train­ing 4.0” and “Work­ing Envi­ron­ment 4.0” as well.
The under­ly­ing goal of all efforts to make Indus­try 4.0 a real­i­ty is the inte­gra­tion of dif­fer­ent func­tions across sys­tem bound­aries. “That is why Fes­to is work­ing close­ly with oth­er com­pa­nies in the Ger­man Elec­tri­cal and Elec­tron­ic Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ Asso­ci­a­tion and on the Plat­form Indus­try 4.0 project to cre­ate a com­mon ref­er­ence archi­tec­ture,” explains Dr Michael Hoffmeis­ter, Man­age­ment Expert in the new­ly cre­at­ed Dig­i­tal Busi­ness section.

Festo product key

As part of this, the com­pa­ny is using dig­i­tal twins to embed its prod­ucts and solu­tions in the com­mon admin­is­tra­tion shell of this ref­er­ence archi­tec­ture (RAMI). All prod­ucts are pro­vid­ed with a prod­uct label includ­ing a data matrix code, known as the Fes­to prod­uct key, which gives access to a wealth of infor­ma­tion. This is the key to the world of Indus­try 4.0.
In future, a Fes­to prod­uct will receive con­stant dig­i­tal upgrades as the Fes­to prod­uct key will be linked to the new­ly cre­at­ed Fes­to App World. With the Fes­to App World upgrades and ser­vices for a spe­cif­ic com­po­nent can be bought. It includes mobile apps, for the Fes­to Motion Ter­mi­nal for exam­ple, web apps for the cloud, desk­top apps, apps for pro­gram­ma­ble log­ic con­trollers and firmware apps.

IoT gateway to data analysis

Back in the here and now, the com­pa­ny can already present the first turnkey solu­tion for IoT-ready com­po­nents and dash­boards. The IoT gate­way CPX-IoT con­nects com­po­nents and mod­ules from the field lev­el, such as the Fes­to Motion Ter­mi­nal, the ener­gy mon­i­tor­ing mod­ule MSE6-E2M or han­dling sys­tems, to the Fes­to Cloud via their OPC UA inter­face. The data can be pre­pared and mon­i­tored using the cloud. This enables trend analy­ses to be deter­mined, and to set up ear­ly warn­ing sys­tems and auto­mat­ic noti­fi­ca­tions in the event of inci­dents. The IoT gate­way pro­vides the cloud inter­face to a con­troller, and ensures that the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion is com­mu­ni­cat­ed in the right for­mat at the right time.
With the IoT gate­way CPX-IoT, it is pos­si­ble to have pre­con­fig­ured dash­boards for each Fes­to com­po­nent – with addi­tion­al cus­tomi­sa­tion. The dash­board is viewed in the web brows­er and shows dia­grams and traf­fic light indi­ca­tors. Spe­cif­ic wid­gets, i.e. com­po­nents of a user inter­face, and dia­grams for ener­gy mon­i­tor­ing, pre­ven­tive main­te­nance as well as per­for­mance fig­ures for the process and for over­all equip­ment effec­tive­ness improve­ment, pro­vide clar­i­ty. The con­di­tion mon­i­tor­ing solu­tion improves error diag­nos­tics and fault iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, cre­ates trans­paren­cy about ener­gy con­sump­tion, deliv­ers clear infor­ma­tion in graph form and makes his­tor­i­cal data available.